Sandra Thaxter invites her readers into this collection of poems: “Come! / and stay! / at least until the tide / runs in and out.” Accepting the invitation, we find that she’s made a place for us here, and what a place it is! “No expectations,” we’re told, and nothing is pressed on us. What we are offered is an elemental simplicity—“Islands are spare places,” she reminds us—and the poet’s own solitude, peopled with memories in which the sea is never far away. Even her dreams take her where “the house of my father…sits high on the brow of the land.” Wedding guests “flow…/ around the sloping lawns / like seaweed in the tide.” We meet a free spirit who “blew in” from Norway “singing ‘Come Back Liza’ / to the the strawberry-haired child / who rode his shoulder.” Where “a fog hovers over the slate roofs,” the spirit of her great-grandfather looks out from the top floor of the bank, wrapped in his own fog of silence and calm. This is a place the reader will return to again and again.
—Alfred Nicol is the author of several poetry collections, his latest ‘Animal Psalms’ was a finalist for the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.
The Shapes of Stone, sends us on a journey to the many islands in her memory, with an accompanying soundtrack in the poem, “Listening to Nora Jones.” In poems reflecting the meter of the tides and describing the wind bending “daisies yearning” in seaside gardens, a favorite childhood rock with a “wet seaweed beard,” we are placed in the mists of a “damp Maine morning,” “lost in a somber wash of adults.” In finely etched details, we are brought to a rainy island wedding…the child, “a small flower in a bouquet of taffeta”; the secret rooms in a family house “high on the brow of the land”; the chambers of an honored relative; and, in “No Expectations,” in anticipation of an island meeting, wondering if what’s brought “will be enough.” Finally, in “My Ashes,” we return to the sea where another child will “stand on this windy bluff, raise her arms, and sing to the wind.”—the end of a poetic voyage with many beautiful and heartfelt passages.
–Priscilla Turner Spada, author of Light in Unopened Windows published by Finishing Line Press.
With her opening poem, “Come,” poet Sandra Thaxter invites the reader to enter her memories of childhood and family, to share the early experiences that establish so much of who and what we become. With “My Ashes,” which closes this collection of sensitive, intimate poems, she gives us her adult response to the departure we all face, leaving the reader with the image of “some child” singing to the wind.
The poems in between those delight the reader with language that recreates the motion of waves and other aspects of nature. They also pay tribute to favorite poets, a pianist heard decades ago, and a singer visiting from abroad, and preserve the details of beloved places, and events recalled as significant, whether momentous as funerals or momentary as observing laundry on a clothesline.
Thaxter’s work manages to celebrate—without gilding as nostalgia does—love, people, food, gardens and those who tend them, human life and its inevitable close. Their very titles—“Dreams in the House of My Father,” “If Love,” “No Expectations”—promise to communicate as only genuine poetry can. Thanks to imagery that speaks to all of the senses, specific common details that capture what we need to perceive, apt use of direct address, questions and oblique storytelling, and the subdued music of their free verse, these poems more than keep their promise.
–Rhina P. Espaillat has published 11 poetry collections and translation including Rehearsing Absence (2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; Playing at Stillness (2005).
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